In chapter 24 we saw that, during his final years, the project of writing a book to be called The Will to Power became Nietzsche's principal philosophical project. This chapter is devoted to investigating the reasons it was never completed.

The idea of the will to power first occurs in Nietzsche's published works in 1878, in Human, All-Too-Human's discussion of selected psychological phenomena: deep down, we learn, gratitude is the equalising revenge of the powerful, the desire to excite pity is a quest for control on the part of the weak, ostentatious asceticism is the quest for spiritual power on the part of the saint, and the bad conscience is the quest for power forced to turn inwards. The phrase ‘will to power’ first appears in January 1883 in Part I of Zarathustra. Here, in the context of group psychology, the idea begins to take on a more systematic look. A ‘people's’ morality, we are told, is ‘the voice of its will to power’, of its will to ‘rule and conquer and shine, to the horror and envy of its neighbour’. By the summer of 1883, in Part II of Zarathustra, the idea has expanded to embrace the whole of life: